John Wall: The successful businessman aiming to transform his hometown club Kerry FC

Taken at the 2024 All-Ireland SFC quarter final against Derry. L-R Mikey Wall (brother), Mary Ruane (sister), John Wall, and Johnnie Wall (father).

Like many of his compatriots during the job starved early nineties, John Wall left home in Tralee to try his luck in London.

Seven years later, by now an accountant, he noticed a position advertised in the Financial Times that tickled his interest.

Concerned that he might be underqualified, he remembered a piece of wisdom that he’d been offered long ago by a family friend, Brian Looney, then editor of The Kerryman newspaper.

“Johnny Boy,” advised Looney, “Never be afraid of a big job. Somebody has to do them.” Wall successfully applied, relocated back to Ireland, built an organisation of 350 people, mostly in Cork, and now, twenty-eight years later, he is the Chief Financial Officer of Cadence Design Systems, a global company valued somewhere north of eighty billion dollars.

A big job indeed.

These days his place of work is in San Jose California at the heart of Silicon Valley but lately, when he escapes from balance sheets and budget forecasts, his mind’s eye has been wandering for often back to the Kingdom of Kerry.

“I’ve been very lucky” explains Wall. "I was promoted to CFO and came out here to HQ from Ireland in 2015 when we were worth five billion. It’s eighty billion plus now, but then, after a while, making even more money for millionaires doesn’t fill your cup and when the football thing came up, I thought, this could be a bit of craic, I’ll do this.”

By this ‘football thing’ he means ‘soccer’ or as it’s called in his present neighbourhood, ‘saarcker.’ Wall has recently invested one and a half million euro into Kerry Football Club and if he brings even half the palpable sense of enthusiasm to his to his day job as he holds for the future of Kerry FC, then there is little mystery how Cadence has surged so much in value.

But soccer? in Kerry of all places? Does feel like a vegan who has wandered into a meat factory?

“Not at all. Growing up in Tralee, I played everything, including soccer.” he recounts.

“My Dad, Johnny, was Mayor of Tralee seven or eight times but when I grew up in the eighties there wasn’t a huge amount of work around, people were getting laid off, but there was still a huge sense of community.

"All our coaches were our neighbours, and I always admired the volunteerism that went on. My dad volunteered for everything, that’s how he ended up getting into politics in the first place.

"Working for these American companies, it just takes over your life for a while because they expect everything of you, but I’ve always tried to volunteer wherever I’ve lived.”

John Wall insists his ownership of Kerry FC will be light touch. 

Wall’s appetite for community involvement wasn’t inherited solely from his dad. His Grandfather was the great Sean ‘Jack’ McCarthy a legend of Kerry football and Munster GAA in general.

“Nobody said anything about it at home, when I was younger,” he chuckles, “but I remember when Mick O’Dwyer took the team to a four in a row in 1981 my grandmother said, ‘ah sure, your grandfather trained the first team to do that!’

"Grandad didn’t want to be the coach at the time, but he was pulled into it by the GAA because he was the only one that could talk to both sides, things were very fraught in the late 20s.

"There was still a lot of bad blood from the civil war, but he was able to get them to leave their grievances at the door and play a game of football for Kerry. That was his nature, he was a diplomat.”

Four successive Sam Maguires in would be enough to garnish any normal CV, but Jack McCarthy wasn’t normal. He was Chairman of the Kerry County Board while he coached the team and in 1931 was elected secretary of the Munster GAA Council.

He held this job until he died forty-six years later in 1977, fittingly on the same day that Kerry hammered Cork by fifteen points in the Munster final. He found the time to referee two All-Ireland football finals along the way too.

Wall fondly recalls his childhood amid the mayhem of an open family home in Day Place at the beating heart of Tralee. Constant commotion, callers seeking tickets, posting meeting minutes, organising schedules, transport to matches, mucky boots in the wrong place, football, soccer and hurling chatter.

Education was in there somewhere too, but John Wall didn’t have much space left for it and his accountancy qualifications came later in life, which proves that the route to corporate success doesn’t always run in a straight line.

His line into League of Ireland ownership was neither straight nor true either.

He continues. “I’d been thinking for a while that I should get into something back home and the League of Ireland looked interesting. Bray Wanderers were looking for investors and I wondered if I could help. 

"It would have been handy because it’s close to my ‘home home’ in Enniskerry. I contacted Tony Richardson (Chairman, Bray Wanderers). I’d always been an admirer of Tony and what he’d achieved in the business world. Tony was great to me, and I was close to investing but then I became aware of the whole Kerry situation.”

The ’Kerry situation’ was the ongoing ripples after the splash of the departure of Brian Ainscough to Dundalk at the end of 2023. Ainscough had funded the club to LOI status but concluded that the grass was greener on the artificial surface of Oriel Park.

Kerry trundled their way through their second season but finished bottom of the league, the winners Cork City a fifty-one-point dot in the distance.

Wall, a pragmatist, realises that the approaching mountain is steep but reckons the quality and experience of his climbing team can lead them safely to base camp one at least.

“When I looked at Kerry FC,” he says, “I could see that had great people there who had been running things on a shoestring. Billy Dennehy, a legend, I remember following his career when he played, and Steven Conway I knew from Tralee. Billy and Steven are the two guys that run the club, Conor McCarthy is the first team coach and we’re lucky to have him. And the help from Sean O’ Keefe and Geraldine Nagle from the Kerry district league, honest to God, getting up at seven on a Saturday morning to put up nets on a rainy pitch so kids can play and getting nothing for it. They live and breathe soccer.”

Wall first spoke with Cork City owner, Dermot Usher who offered ‘gracious and helpful’ advice and then finally decided he was in. But one and a half million is a fair chunk of change for a man who has made a career carefully caring for money and numbers. There must have been wobbles along the decision path?

“I’m an accountant, I do my homework, but nobody investing in a football club expects to get anything out of it financially,” he concedes.

“But then I thought, look, if I’m in I’m in. I didn’t want just to provide money; I wanted to help. At the same time, I don’t want to be stepping on any toes either. I laughed with Billy about this. Kerry is a place where every man and woman wants to be a king or queen, but nobody will wear the crown."

John Wall is a man accustomed to the unforgiving sharp elbows of corporate America management techniques but insists that his ownership will be light touch, and his club won’t be over-burdened by visions, strategies, metrics and performance reviews.

“I just want to feel we are making progress in building a brand,” he insists. “Building a club, giving people an opportunity to play soccer in the county and preparing young people for adulthood. How would we differentiate ourselves?” he asks himself and being a man of Kerry, answers with questions too.

“Could we be the club that if you were a parent of a really good player, they ‘d be happy to be at Kerry because they know that we’ll take care of them? Can we be something more than a football club? Can we help young people to become self-sustainable contributing members to our community and society? How do we set up a club that reflects our community?"

His leadership style sounds uncomplicated; identify the problem to be solved, then stop doing things that don’t work and do more of the things that do. One of the first problems he has identified in Kerry is the absence of a stadium which limits the home attendance to 1400 when the first division capacity average nearer 4000. He knows that patience will be necessary.

“You can be the greatest gardener in the world, but you still have to wait for things to grow,” he says, “so this will be a ‘show me’ season. I hope we can set up a structure for the long term, start the right way. The Kingdom is about community, loyalty, inclusivity and respect for tradition and culture. We should start by rooting in the community and its shared values."

Because of a time-ravenous job and a life lived eight-thousand kilometres from Tralee, Wall knows that he won’t be able to attend too many matches this season in person and will need to rely on that shiny communications technology invented in the buildings surrounding him. Will not having an immediate influence frustrate him?

“Definitely not. When I first spoke with Billy and Steven about my plans, all I could offer them was loyalty and patience. Then Billy asked me what kind of football I wanted the team to play, and I said, ‘Jesus Billy, why are you asking me that? What would I know about football. That’s your job.’"

Yet another big job indeed.